Frederick Sanger, 1918–2013

British biochemist Frederick Sanger was one of only four people to ever win two Nobel Prizes, but he never basked in glory. Declining to use his stature to secure a prestigious teaching post or direct the research of others, he remained so modest that a colleague once said he could have easily been mistaken for a lab assistant. Yet the work Sanger dismissed as mere “messing about in the lab” opened the genomic era. He was the first to decipher the structure of proteins, the first to decode an organism’s entire genome, and the discoverer of the method geneticists used to unravel the human genetic code.

Sanger originally planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and go into medicine, said The Guardian (U.K.). But “he was attracted to biochemistry by the sheer excitement” for the discipline among young scientists at Cambridge University in the late 1930s. Raised a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector during World War II, staying at Cambridge and getting his Ph.D. as he immersed himself in the study of proteins.

Scientists then knew that proteins were made up of amino acids, but “many thought that the order in which the amino acids were linked together was irrelevant,” said The Economist. Sanger’s painstaking work on the protein insulin over a decade proved every protein “was made up of a single, precise sequence of amino acids.” By breaking up insulin molecules and figuring out how to fit them back together, Sanger was the first to highlight the importance of sequencing, for which he was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

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Sanger then “turned his attention to the much more difficult problem of sequencing DNA,” said the Los Angeles Times. Further refining his techniques, in 1977 he sequenced the DNA of an entire organism, the virus phi X 174. Sanger’s approach, which was replicable by computer and later used “in sequencing the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome,” earned him the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry, putting him in the category of double winners alongside radioactivity pioneer Marie Curie, chemist Linus Pauling, and physicist John Bardeen. The U.K. offered Sanger a knighthood. He refused, “saying that he did not want to be called ‘Sir.’”